Hyrule Warriors is Not Flying off the Shelves

Hyrule Warriors managed to sell over 69,000 copies in its first week; however as a whole the game only sold slightly over half of its shipment. With this game being a unique hybrid of two popular series, why would the crossover not do as well?

Find out more after the jump.

Hyrule Warriors only sold 57.33% of its shipment; but a lot of that could be a result of this game being so different from traditional Zelda and Warrior games. Zelda games rely heavily on puzzles and dungeons, but Hyrule Warriors adopted the hack and slash gameplay from the Warriors series.  Also the Warriors games have a lot of focus on stories and characters while the Zelda games tend to have little to no story or character development to them. Having these two vastly different games come together could have deterred both Warriors and Zelda fans from purchasing the game.

Even though Warrior games sell extremely well in Japan a huge factor in those numbers comes from the popularity of the characters that are within the game.  If you compare the One Piece and Gundam Warriors games: One Piece sold over 600,000 copies while the Gundam version sold less than 130,000.  While the Legend of Zelda series is popular the handheld games sell more copies and sell much faster than the console versions.

So, what do you think was the main issue behind the low quantity of units sold? Was it the popularity of Zelda games? Was this game just too different from both Zelda and Warrior Games, or do you think another factor contributed to these sales? Also do you think the game will have more or less success in the west? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Siliconera